A blog about making, teaching, and loving dance, written by witness-participant, Catherine Cabeen.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Excavation Site: Martha Graham USA

It was an honor and a strange pleasure
to be a part of Michael Kliën’s Excavation Site: Martha Graham USA, on January 16, 2016.

Photo:Brigid Pierce

Kliën’s “social
choreography” seeks to dismantle dominant notions of productivity and
representation in dance, replacing these agendas with relatively open scores,
which reveal the actual choreography of social interactions that are colored by
historic and present contexts.

When I was told that
Graham, PS122, and the New Museum were collaborating via Kliën’s vision, I knew I wanted to be involved. I grew
up in a New York that was still strictly divided between “uptown” and
“downtown” dance. Though my own career has bridged many aesthetics, and the
geography of the New York dance scene has shifted, the division between
for-profit and experimental dance is still rarely broken. Hence I was intrigued
to see what would come of a group of dancers tied together via an outrageously
formal and performative movement technique, diving together into an
experimental space of the unknown.

The project utilized the
entire 11th floor of Westbeth, which will always in my mind be
the Cunningham Studios, not the Graham studios. The space was transformed into
a kind of salon through the ingenuity of dramaturge Steve Valk so that the
audience could engage in a brief philosophical and historic Graham intensive
before venturing into the main studio. This beautiful studio was draped in
heavy black curtains, closing it into a black box that was immersed in a
surround sound electronic score. In response to Graham’s assertion
that, “where a dancer places her feet is holy ground,” the audience was asked
to take off their shoes before entering this space. In the studio the audience
encountered 20 past, present, and future members of the Graham legacy, who were
involved in their own, collective excavation.

Kliën’s prompts
for our excavation were simple, yet at the same time baffling. The entire
project reminded me of a Zen koan. Something designed to short circuit one’s
brain, so that we might catch a glimpse of what lies beneath the
mind-as-director of our constructed selves and rehearsed interactions. My
understanding of the instructions was to act, observe,ponder,
and take note of the sediment that remains. Through these four
tasks we were to excavate how action becomes dance, how observation
enables attunement with one’s environment, to allow pondering
to shift into evoking spirits, ancestors, or gods, and through
them to sanctify the sediment. We were to stay engaged with
one another, but not communicate in codes (language is a code, a wink is a code…).
There were also underlying rules, “do not have ideas, do not be creative, do
not perform, do not judge, do not perform touch, do not improvise, do not
resolve, do not worry, be shameless.”

It is fascinating to ask
such a performative company to “not perform,” to act, observe, and be, but to
not try, do, accomplish, resolve… Wasn’t it Martha who said, “anything but
indifference…”

For me it was the evoking
of ancestors that allowed me to make sense of my task. Graham dancers know how
to channel. It was/is part of Martha’s technique to allow the blood memory of
human experience to speak through your body, as both a mere, and an exulted,
vessel. We were in a space and a community that are rich with
ancestry. Through the four-hour experience I found myself engaged in
an amazing conversation between the present moment and a loaded past, being
danced.

In her essay, The
Female Dancer and the Male Gaze, Susan Manning refers to Dempster’s
assertion that, “social and political values are not simply placed or grafted
onto a neutral body-object like so many old or new cloths. On the
contrary ideologies are systematically deposited and constructed on an
anatomical plane, i.e. in the neuro-musculature of the dancer’s body.” (Manning
156)

In my experience, classical
techniques are similarly grafted into the facial container of a dancer’s body.
Graham’s interest in spirals, contraction/release, and shift of weight, are
movement experiences that become lenses for a Graham trained dancer, through
which to perceive, contemplate, and respond to the world. The technique isn’t
“in” our bodies. Rather, this specific kinesthetic intelligence, no matter how
we deconstruct, rearrange, or rebel against it, “is” our body. The body of a
dancer is a multi-faceted process, always unfolding and redeveloping itself in
relation to what needs to be honored, what needs to be dismantled, what needs
to be said. We can build new aesthetics out of deepening how we consider our
training, but we can’t drop it. The body remembers. (Rothschild 38)

Those of us from the Graham
tradition, who started Excavation together, share this embodied knowledge. It
has a variable aesthetic and ethical value, depending on whom you ask. For the
consumer of traditional western theater, Graham technique carries a high
aesthetic value. Most of us from the Graham tradition believe sincerely in
our work because the profound emotional truths embodied by Graham’s movement
vocabulary have resonated with our own lives. Through these dances we have been
assured that we are not alone in the intensity of our pain and our
ecstasy.

At the same time, to a
connoisseur of contemporary art, this aesthetic is often seen as a site of
farce and ridicule, a vocabulary that has been bankrupt by commodification, and
which is now best used ironically. Viewed in this way, those of us from the
Graham tradition also share embodied knowledge of a community that reeks of a
disregard for the potential ethical value of art. In relation to social
hierarchies and gender binaries, Graham’s theater is decidedly old fashioned.
As a modern artist, Graham’s concerns were aesthetic, not ethical, but we
cannot help but to look at the work now through contemporary eyes, filtered by
postmodernism and an awareness of body politics, which tie aesthetic evaluation
to ethical considerations. (Merrill Viii)

The intersection of aesthetics
and ethics in classical dance is a fascinating subject to me, because I have
inhabited communities that are suspicious of modernism’s hierarchies, as often
as I have inhabited communities that are based in them.

Most of my dance life I
feel like a spy. I don’t really drink the kool-aid in either camp.

Photo:
Martha Graham Dance Company

I’ve often been told in
improvisation jams that my pointed toes and straightened knees show that I am
not being “honest” to myself about how I really want to move, that I am not
moving “naturally.” (Someone who either has not undergone classical training, or
someone for whom the training never reached the level where the discipline
transformed into ecstasy usually launches this critique.) But in this
Excavation I was calling the ancestors from this space and
community, surrounded by other humans whose vessels have been similarly
sculpted to fall into classical alignment. Deep within ourselves, is a love of
the intersection between the body and sacred geometry, and an unrelenting faith
that dances can align us with spiritual forces through technical precision.

After laying on the studio
floor for nearly 30 minutes, opening my senses to the energy in the space, the
first thing I felt compelled to do was a series of Cunningham tendus with the
full torso involved in many opposing directions. Throughout the Excavation I
would find myself on relevé, balanced on one foot, and
being drawn into the constellation of bodies I observed in the space, my own
body channeling the lines of that living architecture.

For the audience I imagine
there was a strange aesthetic disconnect between the informality of the whole
and the precision of the individual disciplined bodies. However, when I would
start to hear the voices in my head saying that I was surely doing too much,
that the aesthetics embodied by my “uptown” physicality are “wrong” for this
sort of experimental performance practice… That my embodied “old school”
aesthetics represent tyranny and ignorance, I could let myself drop that shame
and observe myself in a precarious balance, being stretched into physical lines
that cut through the space. It was an incredible luxury of
permission.

As my body was pulled into
various forms, it was also pulled into various people. Some of them were in the
room in bodies; others came through movement and touch. At one point I knew Dudley
Williams was with me, as I was pulled into a coccyx balance that lasted for
many, many breaths. A spiral that started from Graham’s pelvis broke into a
Laura Dean spin that continued until I felt that it would surely be easier to
keep turning forever than to stop. The diagonals of the space kept pulling me,
as I fell into the energetic etchings of numerous dancers who have gone “across
the floor” in that room. Eye contact and physical contact with friends and
strangers allowed for equal parts fascination, connection, and disinterest.
Non-attachment fueled dignity in both greetings and departures, but the
infinite possibilities in a room of experienced humans are also tinted with risk.

Channeling in a community
of Graham dancers can be dangerous business. At
times, the ricochet from heartbreak to ecstasy in the air was enough to give me
spiritual whiplash. Graham was always battling demons, and they came too.

There were many times when
I tried to walk away, only to find myself on a circular path, back where I had
begun, facing the same challenges. There were times when the open channel of my
body pierced my heart with insatiable longing for something I cannot name. At
one point I found myself dancing with Abdiel Cedric Jacobson, but it was no
gentle pas de duex. It was a dance in which I was genuinely working hard to
survive. From the depths of his excavation, he had brought the Minotaur and it
came for me, pushing me up against all of my supposed limitations of strength
and age. I do not know Abdiel well, but in this moment of being danced we were
intimate conspirators and servants to momentum, grasping for each other in a
dynamic, asymmetrical equilibrium.

Graham’s universe upholds
old-fashioned binary ideas about gender. This is the main ethical dispute I
have with her theater. As powerful as she is as a woman artist, her
choreography maintains the “asymmetrical equilibrium of patriarchy” that Ann
Daly articulates in Classical Ballet: A Discourse of Difference (Daly
116). My own life, and choreography, pushes against these gender roles
constantly, but in the Excavation I found myself placing my foot on a man’s
back in a gesture of power-over, only to find myself melting into him and being
lifted. A strange permission; to indulge in a dance that is not my own, to be
danced by history, to be taken, lifted… and left. Endings without resolution
send us again into the ricochet of ecstasy to heartbreak that is this legacy.

Danger makes us present.
Perhaps this is why Graham insisted in terrifying her dancers, and so many
Graham teachers continue this legacy of the pedagogy of fear. In our mediated
age though, one does not need to yell, ridicule, or hit in order to intimidate. Eye
contact alone is enough to send a fellow human into the void of the present
moment; the realization of personal, ethical, responsibility. Here we are.

During the Excavation I
fell into eyes that I have looked into through tears and laughter, toil and
success. The next moment I would find myself drowning in the deep pools of
eyes of someone I had never met. It was all an invitation into the infinite, breath
taking possibilities of actually being together without judgment, or agenda.

The intimacy is terrifying.

When was the last time you
spent four waking hours without looking at your phone?

Across the room I see
Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch and Kim Jones frozen, forehead-to-forehead. They are
dancers of my generation, women I have known through triumph and transition.
Their gesture radiates love. I feel it tap into a newly blossoming space in me.
One that is learning that the more one loves, the more love one has to give. I
hear my mother’s voice, “It is the most radical thing we can do in our culture:
to cast our heart net as wide as possible.” I am pulled into a new dance in
which the sediment of all our digging leads to gratitude for what we share
through time and space, without language and without shame. We who know each
other, and we who are strangers, all caught up in this dance between stillness
and momentum. The love is there. Even through the history of drama and power
plays, it is ours to invite.

I hear the long curtain
that divides the studio space from the entryway, opening. People begin to
speak. Judgments are the first things they articulate. Reactions are the
second. I long for the un-coded, judgment-free space/time that has just
concluded, but time is money in NYC and someone else has the studio. We have to
get out. There is no closure, no resolution. The void of possibility
spills from the art space into the street. Some people drop it, others drink
it, I gone on into several sleepless nights before I am able to stop trying to
make sense of it.

To act, observe,ponder,
and take note of the sediment that remains. To excavate how
action becomes dance, how observation enables attunement with
one’s environment, to evokespirits, ancestors, or gods, and
through them to sanctify our interactions. What of
this is still possible? Does any of it actually require an audience? As I dance
into the next chapter of my life I will remember; “Do not worry, be
shameless.”

About Catherine Cabeen

Catherine Cabeen, MFA, is an artist and teacher. Cabeen is the Artistic Director of Catherine Cabeen - Hyphen, a performance company that was founded in 2009 as a forum for creating dynamic, interdisciplinary performances that engage the body as the intersection for ideas.
Cabeen has received choreographic commissions from On the Boards, Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater, TWU, the Visa2Dance Festival in Dar Es Salaam, the International Dance Day Festival in Byblos, Lebanon, Pig Iron Theater Company, and the Cabiri, among others.
The New York Times has called Cabeen’s Hyphen, “highly kinetic, complex... visually exquisite,” and “beautifully performed.” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.
Cabeen is a former member of the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (1997-2005), and the Martha Graham Dance Company, among others.
She currently performs in her own work, and with Richard Move. Cabeen is also an Assistant Professor at Marymount Manhattan College and a regisseur for the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
For more information see catherinecabeen.com